londonfilesfandomcom-20200213-history
Sewers And Rivers Below
“London has 500 miles of sewers…” From Call of Cthulu – London Guidebook, which is a great resource about London in the 1920′s. I’ll distill into a reference/resource for our game (which is of course set in modern day London) Since Roman times an underground labyrinth has built up below London, including lost rivers, sewers, and service pipes. Rivers Central London lies on the Thames’ alluvial flood plain, hemmed in by hills to the north and south forming hundreds of miles of rivers. Few now remain above ground and some, such as the Shoreditch and the Langbourne, have been lost completely. Their courses are now a mystery. The Fleet This best documented of London’s underground rivers flows from Highgate via Camden Town and the City to the Thames near Blackfriar’s. It once ran through the seediest parts of 18th century London. Dead animals, industrial, and human waste turned it into a foul sewer. It was covered in 1765 but in 1864 the fetid gasses exploded, sweeping away many buildings in a tidal wave of sewage. Tyburn This also started in Hampstead and was bricked over as a sewer. It runs below Regent’s Park, Oxford Street, the headquarters of the Secret Service, Buckingham Palace, across Whitehall, and into the Thames near Old Scotland Yard. A padlocked grill prevents access under the Houses of Parliament. The Victorian writer John Hollingshead wrote about his voyage through it – infrequent gratings, dimly illuminated, stained yellow brick walls. Its remains included a Roman bath house and a 13th century reservoir. The Westbourne Like the Tyburn, this starts in Hampstead Heath, runs under Hyde Park where it forms the Serpentine, crosses the District and Circle Underground Lines at Sloane Square and joins the Thames at Chelsea. The Walbrook This runs below the City through culverts and aqueducts beneath the burial ground of the old Bethlem Hospital (the original Bedlam). Stamford Brook This was the last of North London’s rivers to be turned into a sewer and its upper reaches were still open in the 1920s. In 1929 the Parish Magazine of St. Mary’s Stamford Brook recommended getting permission to walk along the river as far as Acton, since it lay in a narrow but walkable tunnel. The Neekinger This is the best known South London river. Its name comes from Neckinger Wharf, or ‘Devil’s Neckinger’ where Thames pirates were executed with a rope called the Devil’s Neckcloth until the mid-18th century. It runs through Elephant and Castle, and along New Kent road. In the 19th century it was a filthy above-ground sewer containing Jacob’s Island, known as the ‘capital of cholera’. Wooden shanties were built over the festering ooze. The exact point at which the Neckinger joins the Thames has been lost. Sewers Getting into sewers through manhole covers is easy, but so is getting lost once in them. No complete maps exist and only those who work there really know their way around. London has 500 miles of sewers. Some like the Fleet, Qburn, and Westbourne are fifteen feet high and easily walkable with huge pillared and buttressed chambers like underground cathedrals, but most sewers are only four feet high. Nevertheless, ‘gangers’ are employed to clean and repair the crumbling brickwork. Working in pairs, one above watches for rain and knocks on covers to warn the other. Rain raises the water level quickly from a few inches to several feet with only a rush of air as warning. A sudden storm can send tidal waves down the sewers. Some of the City’s sewers are medieval but most were built in the 19th century when “the Great Stink” of the Thames forced wealthy people to leave London in high summer. Interceptor sewers using gravity channel the sewerage away from the Tharnes were designed by Joseph Bazalgette in 1859. Three main interceptor sewers – high level, middle level, and low level and underground rivers were used. The sewage is then processed at treatment plants. Modern sewers are egg-shaped in cross-section and the larger ones have water gates so that men can work in the dry. There are pockets of lethal gases which kill even sewer rats. These can be gas which will explode, sulphurated hydrogen which is the foul product of putrefaction, and suffocating carbonic acid which miners call choke damp. In Victorian times ‘toshers’ scoured the sewers for lost valuables but many died there, so the entrances along the Thames were barred up. The most populous animal under London is the brown rat which came over from Russia in the 18th century and is more fertile and fierce than the native black rat. Most lie under Westminster, attracted from the Thames by the refuse from West End restaurants. Sewer workers have been known to kill 200 a day. Eels and frogs are also plentiful in the sewers. Service Duets Bazalgette also designed and built an early service pipe to carry gas, water, and hydraulic power. It runs along the Thames embankment from the Houses of Parliament to the Bank of England with an entrance door at the base of Boudicca’s statue by Westminster Bridge. It is dark and forbidding, its brickwork is damp, and the smell and sound of the river creeps in. Every few hundred yards the darkness is broken by light from pavement gratings – Piccadilly Circus lies at the heart of a service duct system which spans out across the West End as far as the City. Most are just below street level but at Piccadilly they drop forty feet into a circular iron tunnel built in the 1920s when the underground station was built. Category:Waterways